I'll Never Change My Name

by Valentin Chmerkovskiy

  We finished the finals. It felt incredible, all right, but who knew what the outcome would be? Judges were fickle. “Adjudicators,” they are called within the dance world, and they had the power to adjudicate me right out of my socks. Dances had felt incredible to me before, and the results never seemed to match my enthusiasm.

  We did our final bows, and one of the traditions was to link arms with all the finalists and run across the floor together. It was a tradition that the pros started, and I had seen them, exhausted after the finals, linking arms and doing their run together. My whole life, I had wanted to make that run, but you could only do it if you were in the finals at a major competition. As we joined together and dashed across the floor, I flashed back to all those mornings running laps at the Boys & Girls Club in Jersey. The moment was awesome, it was cool, but then we had to await the results.

  The announcers called out the sixth place couple, fifth place, fourth place, third place . . . and Deena and I had wound up in the top two. We were either going to win or be the runners-up.

  I stood back. As I’ve said, I’m not much of a religious person at all. I was raised with plenty of tradition and culture, with Eastern European and Jewish influences, but I didn’t have that intimate a link with organized religion.

  I had my relationship with God through dance. I have such a great appreciation for the spirit of the universe, a connection that flows directly from my heart. I felt it strongly at that moment. Fingers crossed, I was praying for a win.

  Then a spill of Italian words echoed in the hall, and the announcers named Deena and me winners of the 2001 Junior World Latin Dance Championship.

  What happened next was pure chaos. The word “celebration” took on a whole new definition. My dad ran over, grabbed the American flag, and raced up and down the floor, leading the chant of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” As shocked as everyone was initially, soon afterward the entire arena in this little town in Italy began chanting the three-letter abbreviation of my home country.

  They played the victory chords as Deena and I took a bow. Then I bent down and I kissed the floor. My fifteen-year-old self was way extra on everything. I had watched too much Michael Jordan, too many athletes winning it all, and seeing what they did, I sought to emulate them.

  When we received our medals and stood on the podium, it turned out that they couldn’t raise the American flag, because my dad still had it. He had to walk across the floor, and I had to step forward to take the flag from him. It felt like some sort of ritualized, formal handover. All I needed at that moment was a bald eagle on my shoulder.

  Then they played the anthem. I didn’t see a dry eye in the house, but I couldn’t be sure because my own eyes were full of tears.

  At that time I probably couldn’t have put the feeling into words, but in my heart I was thoroughly and completely convinced that hard work and sacrifice always paid off. You will never be able to tell me otherwise.

  Happiness is relative. Moments aren’t bought, they’re earned. They’re felt in the present but are created by the past. Ultimately, at the heart of every moment is the effort you’ve put in to make it real. Your effort determines how much the moment matters to you and to the people around you, the ones you love who share the experience with you.

  I looked to my left and there was a couple that Deena and I had never beaten until now. I was in a country where I’d never taken first place before, in a competition that no American had ever won before, and I stood with a flag that I felt had never been raised so high before. To me, this was the beautiful realization of the American dream.

  Dance with Me

  In the opening years of the new millennium, if you cast your eye across the dance landscape in America, a few realities would become immediately apparent. While dance in general was hugely popular, ballroom dancing was far from the most fashionable form, rarely appearing in the curriculum of schools, colleges, and academies. Instead, classes in jazz, ballet, and tap were much more common, lately joined by hip-hop. These were the dance styles that were ingrained in the culture, especially among kids in this country.

  Ballroom dancing was something our grandparents did, old and outmoded, an outlier in the field. Nobody under thirty knew who Lawrence Welk was, even though he had hosted a ballroom dance show that was among the longest running programs in television history.

  Even when considering this smaller slice of the larger dance demographic, what Rising Stars did—teaching ballroom dancing to children—was a negligible, almost nonexistent sector of the market. The ballroom dance scene at the time was dominated by something called social dance, which was where maybe ninety percent of the ballroom action went down in America. Social dance lessons taught ballroom dancing to adults, and were a whole different animal compared to what we offered at Rising Stars.

  Two social dance franchise chains, operating under the names of famous dancers Fred Astaire and Arthur Murray, had studios all over the United States. They were the giants within the still-limited field of ballroom dance. The atmosphere in these kinds of studios was very social, very laid-back, very much a case of go-at-your-own-pace.

  Only a small amount of instruction focused on preparing clients for dance contests, because in the eyes of the schools they were just that, only clients. It was almost always older adults who were doing the competing. Whenever they did bother to concern themselves with competition, the big social dance studios concentrated on events that were labeled “pro-am,” for “professional-amateur,” because both teachers and students would enter.

  If studios in the Fred Astaire or Arthur Murray chains offered instruction to kids, the classes were usually tossed in as an afterthought, typically scheduled at eight o’clock on Saturday morning, which for most working parents might as well have been before the crack of dawn.

  At Rising Stars, we might have appreciated the big chain studios teaching social dance as huge businesses that dwarfed ours, but we knew we rode in an entirely different lane and had an entirely different approach. We were hard-core ballroom dancers with a laser-like focus on helping kids to succeed in the cutthroat world of competition. There weren’t many other people who were doing what we did, and within that small sector of the market, Rising Stars had soared to the top of the heap.

  As every schoolteacher understood all too well, there were problems and challenges associated with teaching kids. While social dance studios catered to the adult ego and petted and pampered their clientele, kids needed more structure and authority. Rising Stars should have posted a sign at the entrance reading Check Your Ego at the Door.” Instead, we had my dad, who served as the authority up front who kept everybody’s egos in check. Trust me, that was not easy to do, especially with the parents of the students.

  One of my father’s favorite phrases summed up the situation: “Ninety-nine percent of success for kids is due to the parents. And ninety-nine percent of failure is also due to the parents.”

  A woman from Long Island named Jhanna Volynets had enrolled her two children, Nicole and Teddy, in a Brooklyn ballroom dance school. Jhanna was a powerhouse. Emigrating from Ukraine in that first wave of refugees during the 1970s, she had risen in the ranks of Wall Street as a stock broker, making her first fortune within a decade after arriving in America. Then she switched over to real estate investment and made a second fortune doing that. She was smart as a whip, beautiful, and confident, and she wanted to give her children a taste of the ballroom world that she had experienced growing up in Ukraine.

  After a year and a half taking lessons in Brooklyn, Nicole Volynets accompanied Jhanna to a competition held at the New York Marriott Marquis in Times Square, the Empire Dance Championship. There, something beautiful happened that changed this energetic mother’s mind about the approach she was taking in teaching her kids ballroom dancing.

  She happened to catch a dance performance by Maks Chmerkovskiy.

  With his partner Elena, Maks competed in the Latin event. I remember the evening well. After he performed a paso doble,
my brother walked off the floor. I was barely sixteen years old, and thought I had to function like a cornerman in boxing. I rushed up to give Maks water, quick-like so he could take a sip and replenish himself midcompetition. The moment really did resemble a pause in a boxing match, lacking only the ring girls parading around with placards announcing the round.

  I threw some water on the floor for Maks to wet the bottom of his shoes, a typical ballroom hack that helped give friction to the soles so they didn’t slip and slide.

  “Go out and kill the jive,” I whispered, knowing that the final dance in the series was most important. (To repeat my rule of thumb: “It wasn’t how you start out in the cha-cha, it was how you finish in the jive.”) Then I wished him luck, told him how great he was doing, kissed his cheek, and sent him off.

  And Maks did kill the jive that night, mesmerizing the judges, the audience, and the other dancers. He also floored one onlooker in particular, Jhanna, who watched transfixed and totally charmed as my brother danced.

  Jhanna was too stunned to approach her new ballroom crush right there and then, but she made sure to check the program and try to figure out how she could get in touch with him.

  “Where’s this kid’s studio?” she asked everyone around her. “Because I am going.” She found that Maks worked out of Rising Stars Dance Academy, and in the days following the championships she called to sign her daughter Nicole up for a private lesson.

  Driving her children to Jersey from Long Island, Jhanna arrived at the smelly, nothing-fancy studio, its walls cluttered with graffiti, competition numbers, and ballroom dance trophies won by our school’s students and instructors. The story is family lore, and I still have a mental image of that day. Jhanna wore a mink coat and perhaps $200,000 worth of jewelry on her person, and looked as out of place as a royal duchess in a boxing gym. She came off as possibly the most bougie woman in the world, definitely the most bougie person who ever walked through the door at Rising Stars.

  What resulted was the creation of the oddest of odd couples—not Jhanna and Maks, but Jhanna and another, just-as-unique member of the Chmerkovskiy family.

  ON THAT FIRST VISIT, JHANNA WAS IMMEDIATELY MET BY THE manager and all-around boss of the academy, my dad. Ms. Wall Street, meet the Beast from the East.

  You have to understand that my father did not exactly exhibit the most inviting energy. Even when in a good mood he looked as if he were pissed at something—charmingly pissed, beautifully pissed, but nonetheless still fairly intimidating. He had the syndrome commonly identified nowadays as “resting bitch face,” and he carried it off pretty well and quite consistently.

  Underneath it all, my pops was a real teddy bear. He was just results oriented, not comfort oriented. Sure, he received newcomers politely, but he lacked the fawning nature of a restaurant maître d’. At Rising Stars, we were not at your service. This was an academy that had trained some of the best athletes in the world. If you chose to be a part of it, you were very welcome. Come in, sign the paperwork, hit the floor, and start working.

  Jhanna told me later that the vibe was this is an intense place. Tacked to the wall behind my dad’s front counter was a handmade poster with his motto spelled out in large letters: “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail.”

  There was minimal nonsense and very little lip service paid to conventional niceties. Nobody was there to small talk you into liking us. We were going to show you results and that was why you were going to love us—not pretend to like us, but really and truly appreciate what Rising Stars had going on. We didn’t exist to raise the esteem of parents, but to realize the potential of their kids.

  “I have—my daughter, Nicole, she has a private lesson with Maksim Chmerkovskiy,” Jhanna said when she met my dad, stuttering a little but pronouncing the last name flawlessly.

  “So, a lesson with Maks?” he said. “You will just wait in the seating area and he’ll be right with you.”

  “Okay,” Jhanna said, looking around a little helplessly. “Um, where can I put my coat?”

  My dad shrugged. “Put it in the same closet with everybody else’s jacket,” he said simply, and wandered away. Honey, hold on to the mink if it’s so precious to you was the not-quite-subliminal message.

  Instead of being put off, Jhanna was actually impressed. Okay, she thought, this is refereshing. I think our studio might have reminded her of the old-world dance academies that she hadn’t seen in twenty-plus years.

  It didn’t matter where you were from or how much money you had. At Rising Stars there were no separations based on class, race, or social status. We could not give a fuck about where you came from or who you were. We based our judgments on how you acted and how you treated others. We were not going to be flexible with the individual, but rather the individual had to be flexible within the Rising Stars system, which was all about family, camaraderie, and equality.

  As usual, I was working out on the parquet myself, and I sort of idly surveilled Jhanna as she sat in the waiting area with her mink coat wrapped around her. “Rich bitch” was the two-word rhyme that passed through my mind. She watched Nicole have a first lesson with Maks—Maks the charmer, Maks the charismatic, Maks the larger-than-life personality that they both had first encountered the previous weekend, winning the Empire Championship. But here was a very different Maks—Maks the drill sergeant.

  No coddling went on out on the floor. No empty compliments either, not, “Very good, very good, oh, very good,” but instead “Not enough, that’s not enough, that’s not enough!” If you wanted compliments you earned them at the competitions, where they were called medals. So the lesson ended with “Now go home and fuckin’ practice this, you little shit.”

  Well, not those precise words, of course, but that was the sentiment that came through loud and clear from my darling, cut-the-crap brother.

  I thought that might be it for Jhanna, that she would head out the door and never return after witnessing Maks at work. Once again, though, Jhanna was less offended than startled and impressed. The studio still struck her as pretty stinky, but somehow the stench now indicated hard work and perseverance, like discipline was in the air. She fell in love with the whole package.

  After the hour-and-a-half lesson, she collected her daughter and approached my father in the front office. “That was great!” she said. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Eighty dollars,” he said.

  “Well, here’s eighty,” she said, counting out the bills. “And here’s a hundred for the kid.”

  I stood there as a silent witness. Uh-oh, I thought. Here comes a stern correction from my dad.

  He stared at the woman, then glanced down at the bill in her hand.

  “What? What’s that for?”

  “Oh, you know, for the kid,” Jhanna repeated, referring to my brother. She wanted to tip my brother. As though it were radioactive, my dad carefully took the hundred, smoothed it out, and gave it back.

  “We don’t tip here,” he told her, more gently than I had expected. “This isn’t one of those places.”

  I saw a moment pass between them, two very different but like-minded people crossing each other’s paths at completely different times in their lives. “Um, okay,” Jhanna said, tucking the bill back into her Givenchy.

  My dad wasn’t being rude and neither was Jhanna. This was a woman who had an old-world upbringing, who had raised her kids in a new-world atmosphere, but who was now linking back up with an old-school environment at Rising Stars. The style of the place was familiar to her, but unfamiliar to her children, and she loved Maks’s tough-love attitude. Being denied the acceptance of that tip made her understand that our school was not driven by money, but by passion and people.

  That first visit thoroughly seduced Jhanna Volynets. She enrolled both Nicole and Teddy at Rising Stars and began driving from her home on Long Island three, four, and finally five or six times a week. She would occasionally rent a room at a nearby hotel on Friday night, so she and her kids wouldn’t have t
o commute back to Jersey for a Saturday morning lesson. During this time, it wasn’t just Maks teaching—I was there, too. I witnessed the lessons unfold and watched as Nicole and Teddy grew better each week.

  Now it was our turn to be impressed. Wow. Here was a lady putting in two hours each way, in traffic, for her kids to be able to take lessons with us. We examined that fact and thought to ourselves that it didn’t really matter who she was. Whether she had five dollars or five thousand dollars in her pocket, she was going to get our very best. Nicole and Teddy would receive our undivided attention, focus, and effort, because Jhanna reminded me and Maks of what our mom used to do for us.

  Here was a model parent, I thought, the kind who was willing to go the extra mile—in New York traffic—for her kids. In my dad’s formula of attributing ninety-nine percent of success or failure to the parents, Jhanna was the kind who helped ensure her children’s success. Both Nicole and Teddy thrived at Rising Stars.

  We started building a relationship, a friendship between our family and hers. Soon Jhanna no longer had to book a room at the local Marriott, because she stayed with us in our crummy second-floor apartment. She loved my mother and the warm style of the household. Slowly, as others had done before, she fell in love with our world, with its twin draws of my mom’s cooking and my dad’s lectures.

  Her interest expanded to embrace not just her kids, but to our business itself, because she was an expert businesswoman who sensed an opportunity.

  “I’ve seen it all, you know?” she told us. “I’ve traveled the world. I’ve done it all. I’ve put Nicole and Ted into a million activities, from karate, sports, gymnastics to art, to everything. And only Rising Stars stuck. And why did this stick? What is it that you have here that’s so magical? And how can you expand it?”

  We had never before really looked at our business from a business standpoint. We considered Rising Stars more of an institution, a place that probably should have received government arts funding, if only we could figure out how to apply for some.